Poetry.

The Poems Of Stanley Kunitz Confront `The Great Simplicities'

December 31, 1995|By Reviewed by A.V. Christie, a poet who teaches at Goucher College.

Passing Through:

The Later Poems New and Selected

By Stanley Kunitz

Norton, 175 pages, $18.95

Yes, lately we've been intrigued by a poetry infused with the postmodern, by its skeptical deconstructions and complexities. But how it refreshes and affirms to reconnect with a voice, an aesthetic, that risks caring.

"What is there left to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of bird-song and sky and weather. . . . I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world," states Stanley Kunitz in the opening comments to his "Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected."

Winner of this year's National Book Award, "Passing Through" is Kunitz's ninth collection and coincides with the celebration of his 90th birthday. Leave the metadiscourse to some other generation, Kunitz is "in league with that ounce of heart/ pounding in my palm" ("Robin Redbreast").

The volume brings together most of Kunitz's best poems from the later years and includes several new poems that engage with his abiding themes: time's legacies, nature and loss. He here displays the kind of intelligence and precision that hone the lyric moment. Throughout the wide sweep of years we see this rare lyric sensibility at work, as Kunitz purely sketches an instant in time, making a "noble, dissolving music" from a cross-grained knot in the opposite wall, a day spent fishing at Quinnapoxet, a dragonfly or a quarrel. His brief poem "The Catch" is perfect example of the purity of his epiphanies and their intensity of vision:

"It darted across the pond/ toward our sunset perch,/ weaving in, up, and around/ a spindle of air,/ this delicate engine/ fired by impulse and glitter,/ swift darning-needle,/ gossamer dragon,/ less image than thought,/ and the thought come alive./ Swoosh went the net/ with a practiced hand./ `Da-da, may I look too?'/ You may look, child,/ all you want./ This prize belongs to no one./ But you will pay all/ your life for the privilege,/ all your life."

But Kunitz's world is not merely a world of lyric beauty and natural enticements, of "blue-spiked veronica" and his "late bloomers/ flushed with their brandy"--Kunitz keeps a lush, seaside garden of wide renown. Aware of poetry's place through the "millennial ordeal," he insists that poetry "is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. This would seem to be an introverted, even solipsistic, enterprise, if it were not that these stories recount the soul's passage through the valley of this life--that is to say, its adventure in time, in history."

Kunitz's poems go beyond personal history and the testimony of individual spirit. They speak as witness to history's greater deeds and misdeeds. In poems like "The Lincoln Relics" and "The Mound Builders," Kunitz offers quiet commentary on those moments compelling and threatening to humanity, from the disgrace of Richard Nixon to nuclear testing. In "Around Pastor Bonhoeffer" about the German pastor (co-conspirator in a failed plot to murder Hitler), Kunitz writes in the persona of the pastor: ". . .if you permit/ this evil, what is the good/ of the good of your life?"

A luminous and deep accounting of the times to which he has belonged, Kunitz's poetry reminds us that the best art stakes its claim in crossroads territory, at the resonant intersection of the private and the public. And in these later poems we do sense a voice that has crossed from world to world.

Everywhere are the figures of such journeys: Orpheus, Proteus and the Wellfleet Whale in the remarkable poem of the same name:

"You prowled down the continental shelf,/ guided by the sun and stars/ and the taste of alluvial silt/ on your way southward/ to the warm lagoons,/ the tropic of desire/ where the lovers lie belly to belly/ in the rub and nuzzle of their sporting;/ and you turned, like a god in exile,/ out of your wide primeval element,/ delivered to the mercy of time./ Master of the whale-roads,/ let the white wings of the gulls/ spread out their cover./ You have become like us,/ disgraced and mortal."

We sense, too, a voice looking back on what it has made: "I walk into the woods I made/ my dark and resinous blistered land,/ through the deep litter of the years" ("River Road"). The speaker in "The Long Boat" lies down, absolved of a life's burdens that suggest Kunitz's own: "conscience, ambition, and all that caring."

What Kunitz has made has been always generous and full of ardor. In the book's final poem, "Touch Me," he asks what makes the engines of the crickets go, what makes a life go, and answers "Desire, desire, desire." This desire for the world and its details has distinguished Kunitz's poetry. He may invoke Orpheus, whose music brought the trees to blossom, but many readers will be left with an image of Kunitz himself as the lamplighter in his "Lamplighter: 1914," the man who raises an orange flame and touches the lamps "one by one,/ till the whole countryside bloomed."